- Maintenance Shift 1.0.13 - 14 September 2026
Hey mods,Another maintenance patch. Nothing here adds content. Every item is the game doing what it already claimed to do, plus two things it should have claimed. If you hit anything that still feels off, the discussion board is the fastest way to reach me. Thanks for reading the rules before you moderate.The flame war penalty is gone. When a thread boiled over, the game took 3 rep between your actions and the red toast read like you had done something wrong. Now you get the pile-on of posts and a heads-up naming the thread, and nothing else. Reputation and points only move on your own calls. The restart charge from the update dialog went with it.The Link Scanner backs you up. Scan a link, get THREAT, ban it under §5, and the game scored it as a gray call, or worse if a thread was burning somewhere on the board. A THREAT verdict now makes the ban a malware ban wherever the post came fro…
- v1.0.1: first patch after launch - 12 September 2026
I did not expect this many of you. Permaban is a game about reading a forum in 2007, made mostly by one person, and I went into launch week hoping a handful of people would find it. Instead the reviews, the discussion threads and the emails kept coming, from moderators who said it felt accurate to people who had never touched a forum and stuck with it anyway. Thank you. I read every one of them, and nearly everything in this patch comes straight from what you wrote. Keep it coming: the discussion board is the fastest way to reach me.Included in v1.0.1:Threads no longer bill you for a fire you never saw. A thread heating up in the background could hit "flame war" and cost you reputation before a single post from it had reached your queue. Some of you read that as a hidden timer, and you were right. Now a thread cannot charge you until you have handled one of its posts. It still heats up…
- Permaban is out! - 8 September 2026
It's 2007 and you're the unpaid mod of a dying forum. Every ban needs a rule behind it, and the people you punish come back to argue. Inspired by Papers, Please, minus the clock.Launch price is $4.99, 55% off until September 18.A campaign runs about 40-60 minutes, longer if you poke at the desktop, which you should. Endless mode holds the rest.If something breaks, the discussion board is the place. I'm reading everything this week.Thanks to everyone who wishlisted this and waited. It's yours now.
- Permaban releases September 8! - 21 August 2026
Permaban leaves Coming Soon on Tuesday, September 8, at 10 AM Pacific / 1 PM Eastern / 17:00 UTC.$4.99, with 25% off for the first ten days.It's 2007 and you're the unpaid mod of a dying forum. Every post is a judgment call, every ban needs a rule behind it, and the people you punish come back to argue.If you wishlisted this back in spring, the game got bigger while you weren't looking. What's in 1.0:Ban appeals between shifts. The people you banned come back, and the original post is your only evidence.A break room where the other mods ask for favours, and remember your answer.A working 2007 desktop around the forum: a browser, a media player with a real playlist, a paint program, a calculator that takes numbers it was never meant to take. Three playable games are buried in the machine, and one night, beating one of them is the job.Endless mode with escalating chaos, for after the camp…
- v0.71.0: What happens between the waves - 13 August 2026
NewBan Appeals. The people you banned come back to argue. After Wave 2 the shift does not start until you clear a queue of three cases: the post you banned, quoted with the rule you cited, and their side underneath. Two buttons, no tools. Sometimes they are right. The plea never tells you which. From Wave 3 on it is optional overtime.Overturn a ban that was sound and the account comes back next shift doing the same thing, with the same profile in Investigate.The break room asks you things. Two or three decisions a night, each with its price on the button: cover a board nobody is on, work a backlog, let a wave of signups through. Take it and the next shift runs longer. Pass and it costs reputation, and passing gets more expensive every time.The other mods ask you for things too. Help them and you carry a favour into the next shift: someone covers your second board, pulls a full record, m…
- v0.63.0: The board goes down - 7 August 2026
Your first shift ends. You click through to the second one.The board does not load.General Error / Could not connect to the database. Debug mode is on, because of course it is. Line 118, db/mysql4.php.Then NSM Messenger blinks.It's the Head Admin. The database server fell over and he's rebooting it. He is not happy about it either. The box is from 2003 and he has asked for a new one nine times. Last time this happened he drove to the datacenter at 2 in the morning, in the rain. The host is calling it unscheduled maintenance. It's not scheduled, it broke.While you wait, he sends you a link.arcadekingz.comA free Flash games portal, the kind there were hundreds of. Tiled background, hit counter, ten games that don't exist, three toolbars you didn't install. One game that does exist: a helicopter, one button, a cave that keeps getting narrower.His high score is 843. He mentions it twice.The…
- v0.60.5: More pre-launch fixes - 2 August 2026
Shop items now do what they sayAll four consumables (2x Points, Rep Shield, Mountain Dood, Borton AV) were being cleared the moment you left the shop, before the first post of the wave you bought them for. Spam Filter was sold as PERMANENT and its only effect was a one-time bump that decayed on its own. Both work properly now. Their prices have never been playtested against working effects, so tell me if the shop economy feels off.Dennis Sharp finishes his story57% of campaigns ended without seeing the last phase of the arc in the wave named after him. Wave 6 now guarantees the whole thing, and the arc only moves forward on encounters you actually read. His climax also used to render behind the server maintenance screen, at 15% opacity, with the sting playing under a pause.The forum remembers who people areThe same username could show up twice in one shift as two different accounts, wit…
- v0.59.0: Your pictures finally open - 30 July 2026
AddedWinBlows Picture & Fax Viewer. A .bmp used to open in Microshaft Pant, which is not where Winblows XD opened one. Now it opens in the viewer, and Pant is where you go to draw on it. Previous and Next walk every picture in the folder, arrow keys too, and your own saved drawings are in that rotation alongside the photos. Best Fit and Actual Size, zoom from 25% to 400%, rotate either way. The Edit button hands the file to Pant, which is the route XP took.Print reports that no printer is installed. In 2007 that was usually true.My Pictures has actual pictures in it. You will see...Changed12 more icons are drawings instead of emoji..zip and .rar look like different things now.FixedLong error dialogs pushed the OK button out through the bottom of the window. Six lines fit.The Home button in Interweb Exploder rendered blank in the desktop build.Endless mode drew a "?" next to the elapsed…
- Winump plays actual music now - 28 July 2026
Hello, fellow moderators.The media player on the desktop was a prop with a chiptune behind it. It is a media player.Six tracks stream as real MP3s, and the filename the LCD scrolls is the actual file. When one ends it advances to the next, like a playlist should.The seek bar is draggable. Click or drag anywhere on it to scrub. The elapsed clock and the thumb follow the real playhead instead of counting on their own.The vol and bal sliders are real controls. Vol drives the Music channel of the tray mixer, so the two stay in sync and it persists with the rest of your audio settings. Bal actually pans the music, fills outward from a centre tick, and re-centres on a double click.Three-state transport. Pause holds the track where it is and lights up the way play does. Stop kills it and rewinds the clock to 00:00. The LCD glyph shows all three, and the visualizer freezes while paused instead…
- Permaban launches in the first half of September! - 27 July 2026
Here is what the last stretch of work went into.A real desktop version. Permaban started as a browser game. It now also runs as a proper application on Windows, Mac and Linux, with achievements, Cloud saves, and a friends list that will announce which wave you are stuck on.Interweb Exploder. There is a browser inside the game now. Ten sites you can actually visit, five adware toolbars stacked on top of each other, and popups that spawn two more every time you close one. Close fifty of them and something happens.A cold boot. The desktop version starts the way the machine it is pretending to be would have. Power button, fan spin-up, manufacturer splash, a BIOS screen counting memory, then the desktop. Eight seconds. You can skip it, but the first time, let it run.A long pass on how the game reads. The biggest chunk of work and the least screenshot-friendly. A round of playtesting made it…
- Permaban is out on itch.io right now! - 7 May 2026
Hey everyone, thanks for the wishlist. Quick update: the Steam build is still cooking, but the browser version went live on itch today, so you can play Permaban right now while you wait. Play Permaban free on itch.ioWhat it is, in case you forgotA forum moderator simulator set in 2007. You moderate a phpBB-style community, deciding what to do with each post: warn, ban, lock, or leave alone.The clearly bannable posts are the easy ones. The interesting tension is the long-time user with 4,000 rep posting something at 2am that's borderline-but-not-quite. Plus a burnout meter that prevents spam-clicking, so you actually have to read each post. What's in this build today:Full Windows XP-style interface (not a theme, the whole UI)4 forum skins: phpBB, vBulletin, InvisionFree, ProBoardsCampaign mode + endless after you finishA multi-phase deterministic storyline around one specific userEra mec…
